The equation of Orthodox Christianity as practised by the hierarchy as morality is one of the most laughable statements I’ve seen on HP.

Why give Stalin the last word? Why wish to revert to Soviet arrangements?

Well, if you have trouble with Stalinist nationality policy, perhaps you’d like to review your support for Yugoslavia’s wholesale importing of them.

It doesn’t matter.

But it is worth reiterating that Russian-speaking South Ossetia is only in Georgia because Stalin put it there, and has not been run from Tbilisi, despite the best efforts last year, since the fall of the USSR. Why give Stalin the last word? Why wish to revert to Soviet arrangements?

The Russian “regime” certainly bears comparison with the Georgian one in terms of democracy or corruption. And it is not “amoral” – it has even reintroduced the teaching of Christianity in schools.

I have (very) great respect for many of the stances that you take on domestic, and broader philosophical/moral/religious matters; and indeed broadly share many of these stances.

But on foreign policy – as exemplified in this thread: and it pains me to say it; you are just being silly.

(Quite apart from anything else, I have lost count of how many events one of Mr Putin’s thuggish friends have opportunistically as “Russia’s 9/11″. But in any case, first, Beslan, or second, the Nord-Ost seige, would have a better claim in the direction of such a title than anything that happened in South Ossetia at the behest of the Georgian state last year.) I speak in no sense as a defender or supporter of the regime of Mad Misha Saakashvili.

And “genocide” (even presuming that the Georgian military apparatus had either the capacity or intention of organizing such thing, both of which were and are clearly not so). Gamsurkhadia was clearly a lot worse than Saakashvili (or even Okruashvili) on the rabid nationalism stakes – but even he didn’t come close to intending or inciting that. You cheapen the word by throwing it around so.

Hmm, I seem to recall that on the first day of the conflict Sergei Lavrov as Russian foreign minister claimed that “2,000 Russian citizens” had been killed as part of the “Georgian-instigated genocide”. IIRC the total death toll of the ENTIRE conflict was put at something like 300 (of whom around one-half were military).

The Georgian regime are not the good guys (nor are they skilled politicians: the fact that , as this article is one of many pieces of evidence, almost all of those who supported Saakashvili when he came to power now oppose him), but…the military and amoral cynicism of a Russian regime whose attitude is to me still best summed up by Putin’s comments regarding Moshe Katsav (“We hear he raped 12 women. We all envy him, we all admire him”) – is really not something to support; nor it is a body whose propagandistic & lying views one should seek to propagate.

And I’m afraid these references to “Russia’s 9/11″ “genocide” and “rescuing her own citizens” (with no questions as to how that citizen was granted…) are just that: Russian propaganda for a ruthless and amoral regime.

Has Russia overthrown the government of Georgia by invasion? No.

Such is the neocons’ hatred of those who hold to the True West, that they actively support “militant Islam” (there is no other kind) against us everywhere from Bosnia, to Chechnya, to Kosovo, to Iraq, to Nagorno-Karabakh, to any number of other places, including the whole of Western Europe in the form of mass immigration from the Islamic world. No wonder that the Kuwaitis, the Emiratis and the Twin Towers-bombing Saudis are so generous with their cash.

Russia’s victory over a President “elected” with ninety-seven per cent of the vote will go down as the point at which the global fightback really began, accelerating when Barack Obama beat first Hillary Clinton and then John McCain (who had wanted as his National Security Adviser a man who in the Georgian interest had committed treason against the United States). Alas, there are still a few outposts. Georgia is one, though we may trust not for much longer. And Britain is another, with no electoral hope of improvement.

Russia won, be in no doubt about that. It is inconceivable that either Abkhazia or South Ossetia could ever again be run from Tbilisi, as they have only ever been during the Soviet period. It is obscene that anyone should suggest such a thing; that sanctity should attach to lunatic borders imposed by Stalin, of all people. Once Straight Left, always Straight Left. For that matter, it is scarcely more credible that Ossetia will not be reunited soon enough, within the Russian Federation. (There is no comparison with the ethnically Russian populations in the Baltic States, although they are certainly badly treated, and that urgently needs to be addressed.)

That Abkhazian or South Ossetian independence is recognised “only” by Russia is like saying that it is recognised “only” by America, or “only” by China. As long as you have any one of those three, then anyone else is nice, but not necessary. Likewise, without at least one of those three, you might as well be recognised by nowhere at all.

Yes, ethnic Georgians were displaced, and that is more than regrettable. They know whom to blame, though. And there were eighteen thousand of them. The number of displaced Ossetians was thirty-eight thousand, who were lucky that displacement was all that happened to them, since the idea had been to wipe them out.

But they were not wiped out.

And nor will the rest of us be wiped out, either.

I would say that the “intervention” is quite similar to that in Afghanistan in that what resulted was precisely a government more favourable to that of Moscow. It’s how imperialism works.

North Ossetia-Alania appears to be happy that it is a Republic within the Russian Federation.

Indeed. Russia has presided over their campaign of extermination and expulsion of the Ingush. Mind you, the Chechen people can tell you all about what happens when people get silly ideas like self-determination when it’s not exactly determined by Moscow. Of course they’re now all blissfully happy.

Georgia started the original armed conflict in 1991 as it did a year ago. Russia couldn’t let the situation get out of hand as most of the SO refugees went there.

North Ossetia-Alania appears to be happy that it is a Republic within the Russian Federation.

The alternative was full-scale invasion, ethnic cleansing being already under way against local Georgians. Not purely like Czechoslovakia and Hungary, I grant you. Throw in a touch of Afghanistan and Poland.